Chapter 8. “I Am for Absolutely Everything” - Osho

Life of Osho

Chapter 8. “I Am for Absolutely Everything”

Among the groups which started that winter was a vipassana group. Like all the big groups it was residential; it went on for ten days, with a schedule of sitting which started before dawn and went on until late at night; and I ended up running it. There was little enough to do, but I was given the opportunity to meditate as much as I wanted. So it was, within a short matter of weeks, that Osho kept his promise to teach me vipassana for as long as I wanted to stay in Poona. He offered me food and shelter for as long as I cared to take it and he did so with an openhandedness which touched even me.

My most vivid memories of Osho are of him at darshan, and this was very tied up with the vipassana group. As increasing numbers of people began to arrive in Poona and more and more groups were started, Osho would say to newcomers to try this or that group; and at the end of any group everyone who had taken part would go to darshan together.

As group leader I would get to go along too, and this meant that I had a ringside view of Osho at work, in hands-on stuff with people.

The mise-en-scene of darshan never changed. You went in and sat down on the floor in a semicircle round the empty chair. Then, like the light-switch had been thrown, Osho made his entrance. He had a superb command of theatre. Namasteing gravely (or was it with a trace of irony?) to everyone, he crossed the porch, sat down, and his small retinue would arrange themselves around him. Vivek sat to one side, Laxmi a little further back, while another devotee sat on the other side of Osho’s chair. Shiva, the redheaded Scots photographer and bodyguard, who in the course of time was to play the part of Judas, stood in the background. None of them moved. There were exotic potted plants, in silhouette. The scene was as composed and brightly lit as a Nativity.

Osho would cross one leg over the other and, so far as I can remember, never move the lower part of his body again during the darshan. Though he was sitting in a modern armchair, he sat in as stable and rooted a posture as any Buddha.

Perhaps he would thoughtfully rearrange a fold of his robe… How he got away with it, I’ll never know. He just acted as though he was King, and that was all there was to it. Krishnamurti is the only other person I have seen who could carry the same thing off: could convey that sense of inherent aristocracy, of belonging to a different order of being. He too, if you could get close to him physically, seemed to have a subtle energy-field surrounding him, something you could actually feel… yet Osho was much more complex than Krishnamurti. Osho had an edge of pure mischief quite missing from the older man. That’s what makes describing him so tricky, for whatever you say about him you have to add that the opposite could also be true. Regal he was – but in a flash he was like Dennis the Menace. The whole scene on that porch kept shifting. Nothing seemed properly fixed. That’s another thing I remember about darshan: feeling vaguely sea-sick.

In his lectures on Tilopa, Osho had said: “Tantra is a great yea-sayer; it says yes to everything. It has nothing like ‘no’ in its vocabulary, there is no negation. It never says no to anything, because with no the fight starts, with no you become the ego. The moment you say no to anything, you have become the ego already; a conflict has come in, now you are at war.

“Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever, because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.

“It is said that even if a drop of water is missing, the whole existence will thirst. You pluck a flower in the garden, and you have plucked something out of the whole existence. You harm a flower, and you have harmed millions of stars – because everything is interrelated. The whole exists as a whole, as an organic whole. The whole exists not as a mechanical thing – everything is related to everything else.

“So Tantra says yes unconditionally. There has never been any other vision of life which says yes without any conditions – simply yes. No disappears; from your very being no disappears. When there is no no, how can you fight? How can you be at war? You simply float. You simply merge and melt. You become one. The boundaries are there no more. No creates the boundary. No is the boundary around you. Whenever you say no, watch – immediately something closes in.

Whenever you say yes, your being opens… “When you say total yes to existence, the whole existence suddenly is transformed; then there are no more rocks, no more trees, no more persons, rivers, mountains – suddenly everything has become one, and that oneness is God.”

That’s what he was doing at darshan, trying to get people to say yes. To say yes to themselves. To say yes to themselves just as they were – without changing a thing.

What would happen was that someone would go up, sit down in the hot seat, cross their legs, and launch into their tale of woe… It was amazing to sit there night after night and see how worthless most human beings secretly believe themselves to be… Osho would sit motionless and listen with that extraordinary intent receptivity he had. When they were done, he would pause and then (and this was done differently for different types of people) say that, yes he could understand how they felt that, but from his point of view this was not really a problem at all… in fact you could see it as being a very positive sign…

What he did at darshan was to lead you personally through a process of self-acceptance. Perhaps it was through having seen so many thousands of people but he had an extraordinary knack of detecting where a person’s problem really lay – and was very sensitive in opening this up to the person themselves… But once he had got you there, to you seeing the basic thing you were on about, then all his skill was thrown into getting you to feel all right about it. His virtuosity was dazzling. He reasoned, he tricked, he cajoled.

Perhaps he did it by laughter, by making you see how absurd was your insistence on your own unhappiness. He was perfectly capable of just making silly faces. But one way or another he got everyone into the present moment, and showed you that in that present moment there was nothing resembling a ‘problem.’ Everything was fine just the way it was… At this point you could see that Osho was playing one of the most ancient religious functions of all. He forgave. He remitted sins. He healed. He swept you up and showed you that seen through the eyes of Love you were perfect and whole just the way you were. That was the real source of his power. Simply he loved – loved without any edges. And thousands and thousands of people were to respond to that, to the feeling he was the first person who had ever really understood them and accepted them just as they were. “I am never against anything” he declared one evening. “I am for absolutely everything, so just enjoy it.”

If, despite all he did, someone insisted on feeling guilty then he would roll up his sleeves, so to speak, and really get down to business. There’s a famous line in Nietzsche, ”Not your vices, but your mediocrity cries aloud to heaven.” Osho seems to have taken this and turned it into a positive basis for therapy. If, for instance, someone said they were getting angry the whole time, Osho wouldn’t say, o no, you shouldn’t be doing that;- on the contrary he would turn the whole thing round on itself. The problem, he would say, was that you were not getting angry enough.

“When anger comes you are not to do anything: just sit silently and watch it. Don’t be against it, don’t be for it. Don’t cooperate with it, don’t repress it. Just watch it, be patient, just see what happens… This is the moment to meditate. Don’t waste this moment; anger is creating such great energy in you…

“Close the room, keep a mirror in front of you, see your angry face yourself. There is no need to show it to anybody else. It is your business, it is your energy, it is your life, and you have to wait for the right moment. Go on looking in the mirror, see the red face, the red eyes, the murderer there… ‘Know thyself’ does not mean sit silently and repeat, ‘I am Brahma, I am Soul, I am God, I am This’ – all nonsense. ‘Know thyself’ means know all thy climates, all possibilities – the murderer, the sinner, the criminal, the saint, the holy man inside you; the virtue, the God, the Devil…

“If you don’t do anything, what is going to happen? Can anger hang there forever and forever? Nothing hangs there forever… Let your face go ugly and murderous – but wait, watch. Don’t repress and don’t act according to the anger, and soon you will see that the face is becoming softer, eyes are becoming calmer, the energy is changing – the male turning into female… and soon you will be full of radiance. The same redness that was anger, now is a certain radiance – a beauty on your face, in your eyes. Now go out: the time has come to act.”

Darshan was like some mad doctor’s surgery. A doctor who gave only one prescription, whatever it was you said was the matter: do more of it! do much more of it! If you want to be free of something you must do it totally. Being total – that was something he was always going on about in those days.

He spoke of the way a young child gets angry: “If he is angry, he is just anger, pure anger. It is beautiful to see a child in anger, because old people are always halfhearted: even if they are angry they are not totally in it, they are holding back. They don’t love totally, they are not angry totally; they don’t do anything in totality, they are always calculating.

Their life has become lukewarm. It never comes to that intensity of one hundred degrees where things evaporate, where something happens, where revolution becomes possible.

“But a child always lives at one hundred degrees – whatsoever he does. If he hates you he hates you totally, if he loves you he loves you totally; and in a single moment he can change. He is so quick, he does not take time, he does not brood over it. Just one moment before he was sitting in your lap and telling you how much he loves you. And then something happens – you say something and something goes wrong between you and him – and he jumps out of your lap and says ‘I never want to see you again.’ And see in his eyes the totality of it!

“And because it is total it does not leave a trace behind. That’s the beauty of totality: it does not accumulate psychological memory. Psychological memory is created only by partial living. Then everything that you have lived only in part hangs around you, the hangover continues for your whole life. And thousands of things are there, hanging unfinished.

“That’s the whole theory of karma: unfinished jobs, unfinished actions go on waiting to be finished, to be completed.”

That first evening out with Asha…

A group of us were having supper on the ramshackle balcony of a Goan restaurant, a few doors up from the West End Cinema, with its scratchy Third World prints of Hollywood movies, just round the corner from M.G. Road.

Somehow I had contrived to sit next to her. Weeks must have gone by because the heat was already starting to build up again; we were drinking bottles of cold lager.

I was very nervous. I watched her long fine hands. I couldn’t believe that everyone else couldn’t see how beautiful she was. Strange how alone that made her seem… We must have been talking about surviving in India (what little money I had was almost completely gone) when, towards the end of her second bottle of beer, she said to me confidentially: “I got paid six thousand dollars for checking a suitcase on to a plane for Canada.” She paused. “Direct from Bombay” she added, as though that were significant.

For a moment I didn’t understand what she was talking about – then I got it. Drugs.

“Just for checking the bag in?” I asked.

I hadn’t known you got paid that much. Her air of elegance fell into place. Converted into rupees six thousand dollars was a small fortune.

“Yes” she said. ”It was a kamikaze… And they were old friends of mine.”

I must have looked blank – a what? – and all I could think of saying was: “But I thought the problem was taking the suitcase off at the other end?”

She glanced at me, murmured something about having done it before, and changed the subject. I seemed to have put my foot in it. Six thousand dollars? Who paid you that kind of money?

Asha – I thought, stunned – Asha is a gangster.

That’s what I thought he was doing, you see. I thought he was encouraging everybody to find out what they really wanted to do and to do it. I thought he was taking anarchism to its logical conclusion. In Hammer on the Rock, one of the early compilations of Osho at darshan, there is the following note apropos of Primal Therapy: “Bhagwan has described it not so much as a therapy as a situation where people can let go into their fears and madnesses, their obsessions and secret hankerings, in a safe and protected environment and where help can be given to see beyond them.”

Not so much a therapy as a situation. In fact as part of an interlocking series of situations, all of which were designed to allow people to accept themselves as they were and then enact what they really wanted to do. I thought he was using the therapy groups as building blocks in this process – blocks which interlocked into a space, a real space where you could explore without fear the way you truly were.

But by no means was this just restricted to therapy grouprooms. The whole of Poona had this live-it-out quality. Nothing was forbidden. This was the reason Osho allowed, even encouraged, some people to be really obnoxious. To go, for instance, on all the stupid power trips for which the ashram was to become so notorious. He had to. He was forced to by his own logic. For it was no good repressing anything, you’d never get rid of it that way. The demons and ghosts had to come out of the machine. You had to live them through. The whole of Poona had this quality of being a kind of theatre, or madhouse.

“The whole point of all therapies” he said “of all group processes, is to create a situation where people can dare – that’s all. How you create that is irrelevant. You give them an impetus and a challenge. You open an abyss before them, and you tempt them to jump. The group is needed because when they are alone they will never dare, they will be too much afraid.”